


Don't Get Me Started

by Eligh



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Break Up, Getting Back Together, Getting Together, M/M, The Boys Make Bad Decisions, The Boys are Both Kinda Assholes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-13
Updated: 2014-05-13
Packaged: 2018-01-24 14:24:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1608362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eligh/pseuds/Eligh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint and Phil. Phil and Clint. It's perfect until it isn't, and then it's perfect again. They love each other, really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Get Me Started

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for MCU through AoS 1x21 and Fraction's Hawkeye comics through #18.

“I’m breaking,” Phil forces out on a groan, “at least five regulations right now.”

His quarry, caught (for a measure of caught) after almost eight months tracking him, grins and twists his hips, forcing Phil in deeper. “No offence, Suit, but the fact that there are regs against this isn’t exactly helping your sales pitch.”

Phil grabs hold of Barton’s hips and thrusts up, holding tight enough to bruise and making the questionable springs on the bed in this equally-questionable motel shriek. Barton’s eyes roll back in his head and he tightens his thighs around Phil’s waist. Phil takes the opportunity and pushes him backward, landing them with a creak on the shaky bed, and hitches Barton’s ass up so he can pound in harder.

“Ohgod,” Barton murmurs, and reaches out, fingers scrabbling for a hold on anything over his head. He lands on a picture frame (bolted to the wall) and grabs for dear life. It pulls away from the wall with a hellish groan of metal and plaster, and this would be almost impressive if Phil was in any way concentrating on anything but the feel of his dick in Barton’s ass, of the hard press of Barton’s cock rubbing between their stomachs, of the taut line of tendons in Barton’s neck where he’s thrown his head back. Damages to the room be damned.

Any thoughts Phil might have had for professionalism had gone out the window half an hour ago, when he opened the door to his seedy motel room in Odessa-freaking-Texas to find Clinton Francis Barton, aka Hawkeye, aka Subject 19, aka Pain-in-Phil’s-Ass, grinning at him from his perch on Phil’s windowsill.

“Heard you’ve been looking for me,” Clint had said, and batted his eyes. “Heard you wanted to ask me to prom.”

Phil, newly-minted as he was as a field agent, had clenched his fists and tried not to growl in frustration. Eight months of teasing, eight months of arrows pinning notes to his apartment door, eight months of blurry surveillance pictures and bare-misses, and _now_ Barton decided to come in.

“I should shoot you,” he’d said. Barton had given him a once over, grin never faltering.

“You’re cuter than I’d pictured,” he’d observed.

How, exactly, that particular comment had led to this—to the sweat-slick slide of their bodies, to gasping breaths and Phil so far over his head that he could barely see the light out—Phil isn’t precisely sure.

He is not in any way complaining.

~

“I’ll work with you and no one else,” Barton says later. He’s leaning against the doorjamb leading to the bathroom, naked and drying his hands on a moth-eaten towel. “You’re spunky.”

Phil rolls onto his back and sighs at the ceiling. “You’re obnoxious,” he mutters, and gets a towel to the face for his efforts.

~

Much to the dismay of Phil’s superiors, Barton’s ‘you-and-no-one-else’ ultimatum does not turn out to be an empty threat.

When they’re finally cleared for active duty together, however, the worries fall away. Missions are completed with unheard-of accuracy and speed; civilian casualties are halved; their precision strikes and effortless mop-ups make them the golden children of SHIELD. They advance through the ranks, and a mere eighteen months after he brought Barton in, Phil’s achieved level five. Barton’s at level four. It’s unheard of.

Their successes are perhaps why a blind eye is turned when ‘Barton’ becomes ‘Clint’ and ‘Sir’ slips into ‘Phil.’ If asked, they can rattle off separate addresses, but the truth is a walk-up in Bedford Stuyvesant, and off-duty days spent wrapped around each other, sleepy kisses, and quiet promises.

It lasts for five years before it goes to hell.

~

“You’re lying,” Clint accuses, pouring coffee into a chipped purple mug with the stiff control that only comes when he’s furious beyond measure. “You’re fucking _lying_ to me, Phil, and I don’t get it.”

“You’re not cleared to know,” Phil says, rubbing his hands over his eyes. “It’s classified below level seven.”

“Classified,” Clint breathes. “Convenient.”

“You know that’s not it,” Phil pleads. “Why can’t you just accept this? It’s not like—”

“Not like what?” Clint’s voice is low and dangerous. “Fucking say it.”

“Not like you going off-grid for a month,” Phil snaps, fed up. “Not like scaring me half to death, not like—”

“Not like Natasha?”

“No!”

They glare at each other until Clint puts his mug down with a sharp click.

“I love you,” he says, but it’s not comforting. Phil doesn’t say anything at all.

~

 For the next month, their sex is violent. Phil goes to work with dark bruises sucked into his neck, his chest, his stomach. Clint crouches awkwardly in his perches, and rubs aloe into scratches down his back.

The day Phil finds him leaning close to Agent Morse in the mess, a wide smile on his face and a light blush across her cheeks, Phil drags Clint home and fucks him over the counter in the kitchen of their increasingly rundown apartment.

They don’t have time to work on home repairs, not with demands at work. They’re barely there as is; Phil’s started catching sleep in his office. Buried inside Clint, Phil thinks desperately that if they don’t have time to clean, if they don’t have time to fix what needs fixing, how are they ever going to find time to fix them?

Clint comes with a groan and goes limp until Phil finishes. The kiss he brushes over Phil’s cheek after is barely perfunctory, and two weeks later, Phil packs a bag and goes to stay with Jasper.

~

It isn’t even a month later when Clint’s new relationship declaration floats across Phil’s desk, accompanied by a mirroring one filled out by a Miss Bobbi Morse. Phil signs his acknowledgement and leaves early, spends the remainder of his day unpacking his meager possessions in his new apartment.

~

The worst (best?) part is that they still work so damn perfectly together. Fury tries, for a grand total of half a mission, to let them have some space. But Clint gets his incorrigible ass treed in Detroit (for god’s sake) and Phil has to swoop in and save the goddamn day.

Apparently five years of exclusivity actually means something when it’s a life or death situation.

So they deal with it and are strained, until they’re not really dealing with it anymore and just… are. Clint starts to laugh again when Phil breaks through his radio silence, and Phil starts to smile when Clint’s his usual flippant self. They protect each other’s backs, settle into a pattern.

The first time Bobbi comes to Phil, scared and lost because Clint hasn’t checked in, he pulls her into a hug and commiserates. They bond, and it’s pretty sickeningly sweet, really. Phil likes her despite himself, and at least some of it’s because he knows Clint loves her.

He wants Clint to be happy, and for once it’s absolutely not a line. Really—Phil legitimately is happy when Clint’s happy, and so it’s good when Clint finally makes it home and pulls Bobbi close. Phil smiles and gets celebratory-drunk with them, and with Blake and Garrett and Jasper and a half-dozen other level sevens and eights. Victoria Hand even shows up and glares at everyone while she sips a martini.

It’s good. Life is nice.

~

“She’s fuckin,” Clint hiccups and sways against the wall outside Phil’s door, and Phil takes a step backward into his apartment, alarmed. Clint rallies. “She’s fuckin’ leaving me, Phil. We’re gettin’ divorced.”

He spends the next four hours sobering Clint up, plying him with coffee and offering a sympathetic ear. It’s… almost uncomfortably familiar, the story Clint spins. There’re secrets, and emotional distance, and Phil figures that it’s the way of SHIELD.

“I’m sorry,” he says late into the night, late enough that’s it really actually early. Clint sighs.

“Why’d you leave me, Phil?”

Phil blinks. It’s been years, and when Clint didn’t ask, and didn’t ask, and didn’t ask, Phil’d started to think that he wouldn’t. He looks down at the coffee mug cradled in his hands. “We weren’t the same men,” he says softly. “We were lying to each other, and we were unhappy. I didn’t want to be unhappy, and I didn’t want _you_ to be unhappy.”

Clint hums at this, and looks thoughtful. “I’d like to go to bed with you,” he says.

Phil’s fingers tighten on his mug.

~

Phil knows it’s a terrible idea, knows he’ll regret it in the morning, knows _Clint_ will regret it in the morning.

Knowing doesn’t stop him from swallowing down Clint’s dick like it’s his only source of sustenance, doesn’t stop him from getting it wet and sloppy, just like he remembers Clint likes. Doesn’t stop him from sucking on his balls, or fingering him slow so he can hear the squelch of lube in Clint’s tight ass, or pushing into him bare, like an idiot.

“Who fucked you like this last?” he breathes into Clint’s shoulders. “Who took you apart and put you back together, who broke you in half?”

“You did, you did,” Clint sobs, barely audible from where his face is buried in Phil’s pillows. “ _God_ , Phil, _god_.”

“Yea,” Phil murmurs, pulls back enough to watch his cock disappear into Clint’s stretched-out asshole. It’s been so long. “Yea, me, I’m the only one who fucks you like this.”

Clint whimpers his agreement and comes all over Phil’s sheets.

~

He’s gone when Phil wakes up.

Phil is not surprised.

~

“I need eyes up high, with a gun,” Phil says, and jerks involuntarily (though it’s slight enough that he doubts anyone notices) when he hears Clint’s affirmative.

They haven’t seen each other in close to a year, what with Phil’s involvement in the Initiative and Clint’s promotion to level eight. Phil keeps track of Clint’s escapades and assignments, though, and he wasn’t aware that he was anywhere near New Mexico. Clint must have been pulled in specially, and there it is—Jasper looks guilty, and isn’t meeting Phil’s eyes. Phil narrows his lips into a tight line and concentrates on other, far more important, things.

Gods and monsters, what a world.

~

After their unequivocal proof of alien life disappears back off to, to where ever—another realm? Phil’d scrubbed his hands over his eyes and tried not to picture the paperwork—Clint shows up in Phil’s office back in DC.

“Hey, Boss,” he says, and closes the door behind him. “I’d like to start working with you again.”

Phil’s tired. He hasn’t been home in two weeks, misses his girlfriend, has at least six hours of paperwork spread out across his desk, and is supposed to back Nick during a meeting with the WSC in half an hour.

“Why?” he asks, and watches when Clint settles easily in his visitor’s chair. “You don’t use a handler for your solo missions anymore, and I don’t run agents. I run ops.”

Clint blinks. “You’re gonna sit there and tell me that you’re not assembling a new strike team?”

Phil thinks of the folder locked away in Fury’s office—non-electronic and therefore unhackable, single copy, thin sheets of paper, labeled ‘Initiative’. “I’m working on a team, yes. But it’s not a traditional one. Director Fury and I are reviewing candidates.”

Clint looks thoughtful, hums and leans back in the chair. “I moved back into our old apartment.”

There’s a beat of silence. Phil crosses his arms, entirely nonplussed by the sudden shift in their conversation. “I… have absolutely no idea what to make of that statement,” he admits. “But I do know that I’m not sure that’s healthy, Clint.”

Clint grimaces his agreement. “It’s kinda a dump. I’m a little worried about tetanus.”

“That’s not—” Phil rubs his hand over his eyes. “You’re ridiculous.”

“The people who live there now are good people,” Clint says softly, and pushes to his feet. “Anyway. Think about the team, Phil. And if it’s a superhuman thing, Tasha’d be good for it. Just sayin.”

He leaves, and Phil spends the next three weeks thinking about it.

~

Loki happens, and then Phil spends a great deal of time (eight days, to be specific, but he won’t find that out until later) thinking about very little. After, he thinks haphazardly about everything.

He’s lying in his bunk at the Hub one night, his left hand curled tight in his sheets, when the thought registers. There’s a throbbing sort of pain that’s spreading insidiously from the gnarled scar on his chest and down his arm, and he can’t sleep, can’t settle his mind, and he really should be less surprised that thinking of nothing in particular turns into thinking about Clint. With a sick sort of jolt, Phil realizes that he’s fairly certain no one would have informed Clint that he’s… that he’s alive? That he’s alive, and confused, and that he misses his friends.

The laptop that comes with the room is clicking and buzzing its ancient self to life before Phil really even registers that he’s gotten out of bed. Clint’s files open up after a few quick access codes, and Phil eyes the latest psych reports with trepidation.

‘Trauma,’ they say. ‘Disassociation, withdrawal, distrust. Recommend redaction of security clearance.’ There’s a date, and Phil realizes with a dull shock that it’s a final date of employment, and that it’s a number that came and went a couple weeks ago. The last note’s a perfunctory indication of continued surveillance, and that Clint’s apparently signed on in some capacity under Stark Industries.

Phil chews on his bottom lip and worries, for the first time in weeks, about something besides the blank spots in his memory.

~

He does not stalk Clint, because that would be inappropriate, and unwanted. Besides, it’s not stalking if you don’t plan to _do_ anything about it.

Phil _does_ drive past his old address a couple (dozen) times, noting the dilapidated state of the building, the down-trodden tenants, and how, a few weeks after Clint left the building carrying a duffel bag (full of money, Phil knows what a duffel bag full of money looks like, okay?) the tenants look noticeably happier. Pleased with this turn of events, he watches from the shadows of a building down the street as ~~their~~ Clint’s building sprouts impromptu rooftop barbeques, and listens to the soft sound of chatter and laughter. He recognizes a couple people. It’s a little… strange.

Phil even manages to not feel too bad when he parks down the street at odd times over the next couple weeks, months—whenever he gets a free moment from assembling his new team—and watches as a great deal of nothing out of the ordinary happens. SHIELD files said surveillance, right? He’s surveying.

He _also,_ however, watches a great deal of extra-ordinary happenings. He’s observing when tracksuited Russians get in a fight with a purple-clad teenager, watching when Bobbi and Natasha and Jessica all show up—individually and as a group—watching when Clint holds his own and somehow doesn’t draw attention to himself one night despite getting into a brawl while carrying a longbow and wearing a Santa hat. He watches as Clint apparently inherits a beat-up dog, and admires the beautiful car that Clint manages to lose after only a few days of keeping the thing.

He’s not there when one of Clint’s neighbors gets shot, but he feels sick with worry when he hears about it. Still, there’s not much he can do—prep for his new team has reached a fever pitch and so he reluctantly decides that Clint can handle himself—he looks like he’s doing okay, various fights and drama aside. It’s pretty par for Clint, really, and Phil’s confident that Clint will ask for help if he gets in over his head. He’s got friends. Clint’s not stupid.

~

“You didn’t hear?” Maria looks alarmed, and Phil frowns. He’s uncomfortable in his own skin like he usually isn’t, but he can’t be blamed, really. Stark had let him into the tower with a shocked scowl and no comment re: Phil’s continued existence, though he’d snapped something about ‘letting Pepper deal with you’ before directing him to Maria’s new office.

“Hear what? Last I heard, he was wasting time in Brooklyn.”

Maria looks down at her desk, then up at the ceiling, and Phil purses his lips. “Maria. Where the hell is Clint? I know he wasn’t SHIELD when everything went down, but you wouldn’t let him fall off your radar.” He waves a hand lamely in the air. “I was assuming something possibly Secret Avengers-related? Is he on a mission? I’ll wait for him, but he would be very useful to my current plans.” He smiles a little, though he isn’t really feeling it. “That I’m still not telling you about, by the way.”

Maria doesn’t crack a smile of her own. “Someone should have told you,” she mutters instead, and when she finally looks at him, Phil’s chest tightens. He knows that face.

He takes a sharp breath, and a soft, shocked, “No, please don’t say it” is out before he can control his reaction. He can’t handle this, not after _everything_ else.

“Clint’s dead, Phil,” Maria says, ignoring his uncontrolled slip. Her face is a mess of emotion, and that’s what seals it—she didn’t look like that, not even when she was trying to convince her subordinates that Fury was actually gone. She shakes her head. “He got into a mess with the Russian mob. They had him—and his brother—assassinated.” She licks her lips. “Phil, I’m—”

“Don’t,” Phil snaps, but finds that he doesn’t trust himself to stand and walk away. He voice wavers when he repeats himself. “Please don’t.” He can’t quite wrap his head around it, can’t picture a world where Clint’s not a vaguely irritating and distracting presence in some little pocket of it—failing around in an apartment in New York, or shooting bad guys with an unsuitable-for-the-modern-age weapon, or saving the goddamn planet with a team of superheroes.

Maria settles for looking worried, and sad, and Phil has a quiet panic attack in his seat. It takes nearly five minutes for him to get control of himself, and the moment he feels capable of movement, he stands smoothly and straightens his tie.

“Thank you for telling me,” he says seriously, if a little weakly. Maria watches him with wide eyes, clearly wanting to say something else, but Phil just shakes his head slightly. Her jaw tightens, and Phil turns and leaves her office.

~

Phil’s breakdown that night in the hotel room he’s currently calling home is significantly more effusive. He curls tight around a flat pillow, smothering his occasional whimpers. He’s managed thus far not to react like this; not when he realized the truth behind TAHITI, not at SHIELD’s disintegration, not with the knowledge of his friends’ and teammates’ betrayal.

But this is _Clint_ , who’s been alternatingly the best and worse influence in Phil’s life. Regardless of what role he’s playing this week, he’s always been there, always been someone Phil knew he could trust with his life, always been the safety net for when everything went to shit.

And now he’s gone, and Phil didn’t even know.

Phil doesn’t actually cry, but his eyes are red and irritated when he finally passes out from sheer exhaustion.

~

Clint—Clint does not look well.

He holds up a finger, stopping Phil’s nervous advance, and Phil’s chest throbs like it’s still healing, like there’s a weight that’s either been lifted or maybe smashed down on it—Phil has no idea what to feel right now.

Clint’s clearly exhausted, his face chapped and taking on the distinct sort of red that comes from early signs of frostbite. Phil’s not sure what to do with that, as they’re in southern California, but right now he doesn’t much care because Clint is sitting in his room, slouched in one of the uncomfortable desk chairs, in filthy clothes and with a neat bandage taped over one of his ears.  

It had been like déjà vu half an hour ago when Phil let himself into his room. A shadowy figure perched against the windowsill, a hint of a smirk. It could have been fifteen years ago, if Phil could overlook their scars and exhaustion, their loss of innocence.

Not that either of them were ever all that innocent.

“Did HYDRA do that?” Phil asks, gesturing at the bandage and at a loss for anything substantial to say. Clint shakes his head.

“No. Some asshole dressed like a goddamn clown stabbed me in the ear with one of my own arrows. And he shot Barney. And then the fucking tracksuits took over our building again, and _then_ when I was in the emm-effing _hospital_ I found out that HYDRA apparently took over SHIELD or something, whatthefuckever. And then when I tried to contact Nick, he’s apparently dead, but not really.” He waves his hand in Phil’s general direction. “Oh and heeeyy, you’re alive, too, woo. Woulda been nice to know, maybe.” He sighs. “Apparently faking your death is all the rage these days. All the cool kids are doing it.”

Phil absorbs all this, cataloguing the ‘our building’ and filing that particular slip of the tongue away for later. He wondered if Clint meant ‘Clint and Barney’ or ‘Clint and Phil.’

“Barney—”

“Will live.”

“How—”

This half-formed question finally gets Clint to look up. “Not now. It’s confidential and complicated, and I don’t want to think about anything at all for at least forty-eight hours.”

Confidential is something that Phil can do. He straightens his back. “You should sleep, you look exhausted.” Clint just looks at him for a moment, and Phil softens. “I’ll make you some hot chocolate, okay? It’ll help.”

“Is there…?” Clint asks, and Phil smiles a little.

“Of course I’ll make it Irish.”

~

The fact that spiked hot chocolate leads to the obvious conclusion of Clint on his hands and knees on the bed, pushing back against Phil as Phil slowly and methodically drives his dick into Clint’s ass, should really not be as surprising as it is.

“I thought you were dead,” Phil complains, his eyes fixed on where his cock’s disappearing repeatedly into Clint’s body.

“The feeling’s mutual, you conniving dick,” Clint grates out. He rolls his hips and forces Phil in deeper. “Fuck me like you mean it, already.”

“Asshole,” Phil bites out. Clint twists sideways enough that Phil catches his insolent smirk, and so he drags Clint up, tweaking at one of his nipples, drifting his free hand down Clint’s sculpted abdomen, avoiding his cock entirely to grab hold of one firm thigh. He bites firmly at the jut of muscle in Clint’s neck and shoulders—shoulders he’s dreamt about, even when he was in a happy relationship—and slams his hips in.

“Fuck yea,” Clint breathes. “Phil, yea, yes, yes, c’mon, make me come.”

“I’ll do what I want,” Phil mutters, but drags his hand up, over Clint’s balls, over the base of his dick, wrapping fingers around the head and playing with the sticky slick he finds at the tip.

“You wanna make me come,” Clint laughs. Phil doesn’t argue, and a few moments later, Clint shoots with a choked-out grunt. It’s just a matter of one, two, three more hard thrusts, and then Phil’s groaning his release into Clint’s shoulder, biting down and emptying himself inside.

~

“I’m sick of this,” Clint says later. He’s sprawled over Phil’s chest, panting, round two in the bag. Phil’s sticky and sated, pleased and sore. He cracks open an eye.

“Sick of sex? Who are you, what have you done with—”

“Not sick of sex,” Clint interrupts archly. “Sick of pretending I don’t wanna be with you.”

Phil sits up, dislodging Clint rather awkwardly. He wraps his arms around his knees and cocks his head. “What?”

“I want you to come home.” Clint’s got his serious face on, lip jutted out a little, eyes crinkled. “Come back to Bed-Stuy, come back to our apartment. SHIELD’s over, you need a place to be. I want it to be with me.”

“We don’t work,” Phil points out. “Remember? We lied, and we fought, and I left. You got married, I’m half in love with a woman who has to think I’m dead—”

“Semantics,” Clint says, waving Phil’s arguments away with a lazy hand. “We lied and fought because of security clearance, you left ‘cause I got pissed and was an ass, I’m divorced, and half in love isn’t _in_ love. I’m in love with you, Phil, I always have been, and you’re lying if you say you don’t feel the same about me.”

“I don’t—”

Clint silences him with a glare. “We’re older and wiser, and we’re not dead.” He looks down at the rumpled bed sheets. “My world ended when they told me Loki killed you. And based on your reaction when I showed up, you lost it pretty bad when you thought I was gone. So why are we putting ourselves through this?”

Phil goes silent, thinking, and Clint’s serious face turns a hair worried. “Phil—”

“You said the tracksuits took back our building?” he asks. “We’ll have to come up with a plan to remedy that.”

The grin that splits Clint’s face is breathtaking. “Yea, baby,” he says, and leans in for a kiss. “We’re gonna kick some Bro ass.”

Phil sighs and kisses back. This is a terrible idea, and he hasn’t felt this happy in a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> “Aw, Lola, no,” Clint says, eyes wide. The bullet holes look especially jarring in the late afternoon sunlight. 
> 
> “Shut up and drive,” Phil grumbles, and tosses him the keys. "Don't get me started, I don't want to think about how I'm going to get her fixed." 
> 
> "It's okay, baby, I'll make it all better," Clint croons, and he's talking to the car. Of course he is.


End file.
